Hi, I've been following this project since January and have posted encouragements before. However I became impatient and over the last week have tried to install Mandriva, Ubuntu and now Wubi and none of them will boot.
This is a long sad tale. I got a free dvd of Mandriva from a magazine and installed it. The installation seemed to go fine but it wouldn't boot. I got lots of help from the people on Mandriva Forum. They told me how to edit the boot line and suggested I add noapic nolapic and load_modules=off. I did this but still couldn't get through the boot. They suggested I try Ubuntu and by coincidence my Ubuntu 7.04 live cd from Shipit arrived so I tried that. I could not get that to boot either.
I have posted details about that on Ubuntu Forums Absolute Beginners section (Can't boot-is it my hardware?)
People on there suggested I edit the boot line in a similar way as before- adding noapic nolapic .This seemed to get me a bit further than before. It stopped on a page for about a minute then eventually stopped on one with several do_page_ fault lines and a couple of error code lines.
There was a line of these =========== and then some code-2e 65a etc and then-
[391.687622]EIP:[<c011ddac>]kmap_atomic+0x5c/0xa0 SS:ESP 0068=f37b3ebc
[391.687826]<6>note:udevd[6535]exited with preempt_count 1
I then tried the latest version of Wubi and it has installed fine but won't boot.
My pc is about 2 years old and consists of a Intel Celeron R 3.06 chip with 1gb of RAM plus two internal drives- a C. drive 80gb which has my Windows installation on it. This was partioned by Mandriva (about half of it). I have deleted all the non NTFS partions and removed Mandriva but the drive is still partioned and now shows in my computer as New Volume K. I tried to expand the C drive with Diskpart but it won't do it. I don't think this is crucial as it is now NTFS and I can access it. Wubi is installed there on the New Volume K drive. I also have a 120gb D drive which is 3/4 full of music and photos. I also have a Nvidia 6600 graphics card and a Canon printer.
Can you help? The Mandriva people seemed to think I have a hardware problem and suggested Ubuntu as it has a newer kernel. When I try and boot Wubi I get to the splash screen but the progress bar only moves about half an inch. I got further with Ubuntu with noapic nolapic added but I can't seem to get a text boot by pressing F6 with Wubi.
Am I doomed to never experience Linux. Please help.
John Williams
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